Stephen Crane

Who Was Stephen Crane?

Stephen Crane was the first American naturalist novelist — the writer who brought to American fiction the deterministic vision that Zola had introduced in France, the conviction that human beings are the products of forces they cannot control and a universe indifferent to their fate. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, he rejected the faith of his upbringing with a thoroughness that shaped everything he wrote.

His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), published at his own expense when no publisher would take it, is the first American work of naturalist fiction: the story of a girl destroyed by the forces of poverty and environment with a cold inevitability that admits no moral judgment and no redemption. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) brought him international fame — a war novel written by a man who had never seen battle, rendered with a psychological precision that veterans found more accurate than their own memories.

He died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight, having packed more literary achievement into his brief career than most writers produce in a lifetime. He is significant for TLA because his work documents, with unusual precision and unusual honesty, what the universe looks like when God has been removed from it: cold, indifferent, and entirely without the sense of obligation that the human being’s existence seems to demand.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets — 1893
• The Red Badge of Courage — 1895
• The Open Boat — 1897 — short story
• War Is Kind — 1899 — poetry
• The Monster — 1899 — novella